Friday, 31 October 2014

Took me a little while to prepare my notes for the second day of The Web Is… conference, mainly due to an ‘orrible cold that developed over the last week. I hope I haven’t given it to the lovely people I spoke to over the last few days!

Thank you once again to Craig and Amie Lockwood and all their helpers for a fantastic conference. I know they had a lot of trouble getting the conference organised, but the end result was very definitely worth it.

Craig — please keep organising more conferences! You have a rare skill in finding and curating talks that connect at many different levels —- and that challenge us to do better and improve the world.

Here are my notes for day two, complete with the additional Creative Morning session.

Thursday, 30 October 2014

Another excellent conference from Craig Lockwood — and this is only the first day.

I’m always impressed by the groundedness and open-hearted feeling I get when I attend Craig’s conferences. He curates the speakers not just for their intellectual knowledge and not just for inspiration, but also for their ability to connect to and understand the world and the people in it.

Monday, 29 September 2014

So that was a pretty busy weekend! Thank you to all the organisers and the sponsors for yet another amazing BarCamp London.

If you don’t know what a BarCamp is, go read about how it works, and then come back to read my notes on some of the sessions I attended.

Here’s a picture of all the sessions that the attendees ran over the weekend (that’s a lot!) and it doesn’t list all the random conversations, games and general meeting people that happened outside of the posted schedule.

Amazingly enough this demo night finished on time and even a little bit early. Thanks to Julia Shalet for keeping things running smoothly on the night and Jo Rabin too for the varied selection of demos — lots of great ideas.

Thursday, 15 May 2014

This weekend I went to a different kind of conference — not a technology one, but a parenting one (though with some technology involved!).

The conference was Kidcrafters — a day of talks by parents for parents, held at the Royal Institution in London (the same place as the Christmas Lectures).

The whole conference was videoed and is available on YouTube here, but here’s my notes and impressions in the hope that someone finds them useful.

The first speaker ran an exercise that reminded me of a quote from Francis Bacon:

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention

The conference felt like a day to weigh and consider — lots of different viewpoints, some contradictory, some provoking, mostly inspiring and all worthy of attention.

For the whole thing to have been organised from scratch in a couple of months is little short of astounding… Congratulations and many thanks to Nick Corston and his team of incredible hard-working volunteers.

Should you manage your screen time?

I was looking forward to this part of the day, but the presentations didn’t really get into the issue at hand.

The first presenter, who didn’t set limits to screen time at all, seemed to have children who didn’t get zoned out by the screen — and he himself hated computer games…

The second presenter had children under 5 who weren’t getting any social pressure to play on the computer and were probably too young to do so anyway.

Matthew Karas — no limits

daughter likes bikes & guitar

son’s favourite activity is writing books with pencil

they will jump off the computer if given an offer to go and play in the park

personally hate computer games

information overload is everywhere: even in a forest

“taking children seriously foundation”

Kate Jangra — no screen time at all

home educate two boys, one four, one two

personally believe that children under five don’t need computing

need to learn about moving, mud, etc — the real world — before understanding the virtual world

played first ever game (sonic the hedgehog) when 17 and didn’t do anything until finished

instant gratification isn’t great for development

sets up unrealistic expectations

indoor vs outdoor debate

children need to fall in love with our world first

ration yourself too — children are mimics

My situation — where’s the edge?

I have two boys: a four year-old and an eleven year-old — both of whom are like me and can really focus on what they’re doing, but lose the sense of their body when do so. This could be on a movie, a game or even a book (for the older one — the younger one’s not reading yet…)

I work with computers for a living. I really enjoy the creativity and sense of possibilities computers provide, but I also know that I can get lost and lose whole evenings to trawling around on wikipedia…

Through experimenting with different amounts of time on the computer, we have found that our older boy finds it harder to stop and feels more anger when he plays for much longer than an hour at a time. The issue seems to be how separated he becomes from how he’s actually feeling — it doesn’t seem to matter if the game is a high adrenaline adventure or being creative in Minecraft.

What does make a difference is relating to another person or being physically active while he’s playing. We have a Xbox Kinect and he is much more able to talk about stopping and doing something else if he has been jumping around the room while playing. Similarly, if I have been playing the game with him — and actually talking to him while doing so, rather than us playing separately in the same game — then it’s much easier for him to relate to me about non-game activities.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? I know my son is quite frustrated that we limit his time on the computer so much compared to some of his friends, but we haven’t found an alternative that works better for us.

Wednesday, 14 May 2014

A new venue tonight — up on the 9th floor of Google’s Central St Giles office. They even provided good food for the hungry mobile mondayers…

The evening’s focus was on Cloud Computing and Mobile, and the questions seemed to focus mainly on the cloud with not much discussion about how it related to mobile. The chair, Camille, kept the discussion moving along briskly, but we didn’t really get into any depth on any of the subjects. Maybe the audience could smell the food!

After the panel discussion

As often happens with Mobile Monday, the discussion after the panel was richer than the panel itself. Some discussion points that came up when I was talking to people afterwards included:

How do you balance keeping data on the device and in the cloud, to deal with intermittent network availability?

Will the banks get clobbered by more agile personal finance companies that don’t have to worry about so many regulations?

Why has it taken Google since 2008 to move from basic App Engine web apps to a full cloud platform?

How will Google make more money from Cloud Computing than from Ads? There’s a big market, but the price is dropping…

…and on a completely different note, several people were interested in setting up Code Clubs in their local primary schools, but were stretched for time — perhaps they could work together and contribute part-time?

About Me

I make things for mobile, web, voice and LEGO; create all sorts of stuff at Tesco Labs using agile development in any language that fits; run a CodeClub for kids in St Albans.
I blog about mobile stuff, Mac stuff (especially Time Machine), agile stuff and the events I attend.
I am @adamcohenrose on twitter — follow me!